find good SEO Archives by Mark Murnahan

Fire Your SEO: Here is Why and How

Do you think you need a search engine optimizer? Let’s get serious. Your company is not a hobby, and you’re not working to build it only because the work is fun. Companies – smart companies – want to receive profit from their investment of hard work and money. Profit is what companies use to pay the bills.

It would be unwise to throw away your profit on SEO services just because you hope it may work out – someday. Don’t pretend to be shocked if I tell you that’s exactly what a lot of people are doing every day. I see it all the time that companies test the water and shakily hand over their credit card to the next SEO that gave them a good pitch. Other companies have all the skill they need for success, but they fail to use it.

I will give you some good pointers on how to select a good SEO, the basic components of their role, and even why you may (or may not) be able to handle much of it without their help.

Before I continue, I want to note that I do not sell SEO services (but I’m still in recovery). I am just here to share what I know from a lot of well-earned experience. Unless you are ready to pay me a huge salary plus a significant benefits package, don’t worry – I’m not looking at your checkbook.

SEO be damned, I’m going to tell you the truth you may not want to hear. It may sting, but it also may save you a lot of time, money, and frustration. I’m not just out to knock search engine optimizers, either. There are a lot of very talented SEO out there who just don’t want to talk to you because you’re trying to compare apples to airliners. As I tell you this, be mindful that it’s your business on the line, so if you’re getting this wrong, your company is the one that suffers.

SEO is a Double-Edged Sword

Don’t get me wrong about the value of good SEO. If you’ve got a good SEO, by all means, hang on to them. They are probably making you a lot of money. The problem is that statistically, most SEO are not very good at the job. Good ones are few and far between. It takes a lot of knowledge and experience to be really good at SEO. The best ones are also very well connected, and you don’t buy that for a few thousand bucks.

A truly qualified search engine optimizer can make an amazing difference in your business, but search engine optimization is a sword that cuts both ways.

Let’s make no mistakes about this: A legitimate attempt to reach your online audience can multiply your business, but an uncommitted and ill-considered effort can send it the other way … fast, and in more ways than you may realize. Rather than paying an inexperienced SEO who is still learning, you may do better to handle it yourself. It is true that a bad SEO can cost you a lot more than you pay them. Seriously – if you doubt me even a little bit, read about “Google Panda, Google Bowling, and How Bad SEO Can Kill Your Business“. If you’re trying to get by the cheap way, it’s like hunting for the cheapest root canal … it’s likely to hurt.

Do You Really Need Your SEO?

What makes you believe that you need a search engine optimizer? Think about that really hard. If you don’t have the right answer, based on the right strategy, it may be time to fire your SEO.

If your answer is that you have a legitimate business case for it, like most companies do, that’s great. Examine the business need carefully, choose your provider wisely, and make a strong commitment. Be sure that they understand your goals, and that they can provide a realistic forecast based on their work.

You should be prepared to pay them for that forecast, too. Otherwise, you are likely to make some huge strategic marketing errors. If you’ve chosen wisely, it will be worth every dollar you spend for their market research. If you get a good one, don’t expect to get their research for free. I’ll tell you why if you read that link I just gave you.

You should understand that even the best search engine optimizer will fail to bring you optimal results if you “kneecap” them with short budgets, “not enough time”, or other excuses. One of the worst things you can do is to make excuses because you are just too afraid to implement things they recommend based on their solid research. That frankly just pisses them off.

The mathematical confusion of SEO destroys a lot of companies’ efforts. They struggle to grasp that a twenty percent effort will not yield one fourth of the same result as an eighty percent effort.

Understanding the math of SEO, and how it pertains to your specific business needs will matter more than you likely realize. I’m not kidding, and I’m not making this up. I’ll explain more about the math of SEO return on investment in a moment.

On the other hand, if your answer to why you need SEO services is that you’re trying it out because you are hopeful it will eventually have an impact, I have a suggestion: Fire your SEO immediately! Don’t pay them another dollar until you have a better answer. Hope alone does not create profit, and it can lead you down a really bad path. If you’re just “testing the water”, take your money and use it elsewhere in your business. There are sharks in that water!

Reaching a usefully measurable result with search engine optimization does not happen from “testing the water”. There is a bell curve (a gaussian function) at work, and it does not work in favor of minimized efforts.

In case you never heard of The Pareto Principle – a widely used economic principle – it is worth the effort to understand it and apply it to your marketing.

Why to Fire Your SEO: Three Things You Should Know

SEO creates a lot of mixed reactions. If you ask a room full of business people about their experiences with SEO, you are likely to hear everything from extreme delight to extreme dismay. These few points are important to know if you want to avoid the dismay.

SEO is Not High Tech! I know that search engine optimization may sound very tricky and technical – and it is in some ways – but the technology aspects of SEO are only a small part of the “magic” a search engine optimizer actually does. I suggest reading “Search Engine Optimization is Not a Technology Job!” If you wonder if it is just one person’s opinion, be sure to read the comments to see what other professionals had to say.

If your SEO has ever led you to believe that their work is largely a matter of technical things, or that you don’t have the time or intelligence to understand what you are paying them for – Fire Them! No, wait … don’t fire them … incinerate them, because they are like zombies, and you don’t want them coming back to try and eat more of your brains again later.

Good SEO Are Smart Cookies! You should understand that you don’t just pay an SEO for what they do – you pay them for what they know, and for what they research on your behalf. If you want the best SEO results, you will need to hire some very talented and creative people.

Here’s the kicker: If they are smart enough to help you, they are also smart enough to help themselves. You should read further to understand “Why Good SEO Don’t Seek Your Business“. If you get a good one who loves your company as much as you do, get up off your wallet and book them before the competition does.

Otherwise, if you ever question their industry brilliance for a moment – Fire Them! Of course, I can’t condone criminal behavior, but you may want to keep a wooden stake handy. They are “un-dead”, so if you see their blood-sucking fangs – stake ’em!

$5000 is Not Half of $10,000! Maybe you think I just made a mathematical error, but I did not. I want to make a point about the vast difference between measuring efforts versus measuring results.

I already discussed the importance of having the right people handling your SEO versus the wrong ones. So, let’s assume you have the right ones – you are confident of it, and you are confident about your business goals. Let’s climb that bell curve that’s killing your success.

You can scale this to any level you like, but if you think that half of the effort will yield half of the result, you’ll waste money. The bell curve I mentioned has a nasty way of killing company hopes for profit.

Look at the bell curve of your industry’s marketing, and notice where the numbers make a sharp increase. Many companies will go right up to the curve and quit as soon as it gets too scary, but then slide back down because it was not measurable enough. A wise SEO knows that a business should push far enough up the bell curve to get the best results, but short of the point of diminishing returns.

If your SEO tries to take you to the shallow end of the bell curve because they are afraid to tell you what it will really take to make an optimal impact, then they are not doing their job properly. Many SEO dread trying to explain the vast difference between doing something and doing something well. In fact, it’s largely why I made the announcement that I stopped taking clients (it’s worth a read, by the way).

If an SEO is unable to explain the value of your strong commitment to their work, and if you are unwilling to hear it, don’t bother. Whether they realize it, they are doing you a disservice and they are lying to you. Fire Them! You can probably achieve mediocre results all on your own, so you shouldn’t be paying somebody else. Fire the SEO, and consider spending the money on an exorcism and perhaps a lobotomy – for you and for the SEO!

It can take a lot of climbing to reach the profitable part of the bell curve, but there is always a point when it becomes relatively self-sustaining. If you keep struggling just to stay on the shallow end of the curve, fire your SEO!

How to Fire Your SEO

I mentioned the matter of firing your SEO. Beyond the incinerator, the wooden stakes, and shoving them off a high cliff, there are other practical considerations. This is a tricky matter, because they have your passwords! You should change them … all of them. Even if you are the one trying to handle your own SEO like the dentist who went to dental school to fix their kids’ teeth – don’t trust the SEO. Any person who does not grasp the importance of this information should not have access to your company website.

If you want to get a better understanding of SEO, there are some basic lessons you should know. It doesn’t come without effort, but if you’re serious enough to read this far, you’re probably serious enough to read these valuable SEO lessons and subscribe for more to come.

Marketing your business should never be left to a roll of the dice, or just getting lucky that you landed the right SEO with the right skills, and who is generous enough to give you success on a minuscule budget with halfway mentality. You should take it very seriously if you expect to see results.

Remember, I’m not telling you this to sell you anything. I’m telling you this because I witness too many people with their heads up a dark place and I don’t want my readers to be among them.

You are not stupid. Don’t act like it with your search engine rankings.

Photo Credit:
Fire Breathing by Luc Viatour via Flickr

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Are You a Participant in Your Business, or Just a Witness?

I blame the Internet. Attack this all you like, but I blame the Internet and its many over-hyped success stories for allowing people to let down their guard and take a “witness” approach to their marketing. We all know that the Internet is a hugely important tool to businesses, but the lack of understanding how and why the Internet is valuable to a company has led a lot of people to throwing their hands in the air and giving up participation in their marketing. It is a knee-jerk reaction people make because all that information about Internet marketing is beyond the comfortable things they understand.

What makes this worse is that as so many people give up trying to be participants in their marketing efforts they give up on even knowing the right questions to ask or directions to take. It is as if they just throw all their fate to Google and a few other websites, and hope they get the right results.

A Non-Participant Seldom Gets Exceptional Results

I received a message a couple days ago that bothered me. It bothered me enough to write this, but it was a message that I see every day from small business people. I want to share it with you, but first, I want to say that this is a good example of why small businesses remain small.

The real problem is the sentiment and lack of attention, and not the actual message content. The sentiment is that of a business owner not really wanting to be a participant, but rather simply a witness to their business. I see this all the time, in a lot of different forms. Obviously, the most common way I see this is in marketing, because that is my job.

I will share the message I received that inspired this topic. On the surface, this may be easy to question how it shows me a lack of business participation, but I will get to the point of how apathy and lack of involvement are common attributes which often destroy small companies. The message reads as follows:

Please provide me with a quote for search engine optimization of my website xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.xxx.

Thanks,
xxxx xxxxxx

Maybe you think I read too much into this, but let’s dig a little deeper and consider the implied “hands off” hope of being ranked in search engines … or the hope to sell more goods or services with little or no effort.

The email, which came through a form on another of my websites, did not even include a telephone number or good time to discuss their business objectives (although it is requested in the form). Does this person want three customers per year, or 1,000 customers per month? OK, so they just want a dollar figure. If SEO is a commodity, as many people wish to see it, then why do some people have huge online success and others (most) never see a dollar’s worth of benefit?

You could say that this individual did not understand that SEO (search engine optimization) is much more than just some fancy programming code that is put into a website to magically bring in the business. The page they visited just before clicking on my contact page clearly explained things in human terms, but what confusion did they absorb just before they read what I told them? Maybe they just thought they were buying pink ponies and fairy dust like so many other people in online marketing tried to sell them. Maybe they do not actually believe that search engine optimization also means researching the search terms with the highest possible ROI (return on investment) to rank for, fixing any technical deal-stoppers, creating a strategy, and more than anything, discovering and promoting the reasons anybody would want to do business with the company.

Without a purposeful message and understanding who to reach, how to reach them, and what message to reach them with, the whole effort is lost. I’ll bet this guy didn’t think of that. In fact, I’ll bet he will be suckered out of whatever few dollars he is willing to part with. Yet, he may never consider the cost of his missed opportunities. He will probably totally deny the fact that marketing done well, including proper and accurate mathematic, demographic, and psychographic research, will always provide a positive return on investment. I did not say “sometimes” … I said “always”, and that is a truth that most non-participant business owners fail to grasp. It will often take more money, effort, or time than the impatient non-participant business owner is ready to face, but if they are willing to do it right, it will earn them more money. Tragically, it is also a truth that most SEO fail to grasp. Yes, I said “most SEO”, and if you disagree with that, then you must not have seen how many people with three weeks of marketing experience call themselves a search engine optimizer these days.

How Do I Define a Non-Participant Business?

You may wonder how I define a non-participant business, and I will explain this with an example.

As I looked at the website this individual wants to have optimized, I found that it was created with Microsoft Word. It was a really terrible “do-it-yourself” job with no call to action whatsoever. It has zero known incoming links from other websites, and even the business address was in the form of an image instead of text. It was really a great example website to reflect all the worst possible scenarios for ranking in search engine results, and more than I will get into in this article. It was like one of those awful at-home haircuts you see while standing in line over at Wal Mart. Yes, this person really needs some proper assistance.

What makes this story better is that I took a few minutes, out of sheer curiosity, to make a good estimate on his potential reach and effectiveness in his marketplace. I found that if they were willing to pursue a path for success, they could pave their street with gold.

Will I contact this person with a proper SEO proposal? Absolutely not, and I’ll tell you why. It is a non-participant! Only a non-participant would ever try to develop a website using Microsoft Word and ask somebody to fix it with SEO magic tricks. Only a non-participant would overlook the need for proper marketing instead of believing in the Voodoo which people make SEO sound like. Asking for SEO, while every other available factor in my cursory marketing audit of this company showed horrible results, is not good business sense, and it is not the mindset that makes for a successful outcome in any business plan.

You may recall hearing the term “survival of the fittest”, and I am here to testify that it works exceedingly well in the business world. It works just the way it has for millions of years, except it works even faster when you apply it to Internet marketing.

Simply “SEO-ing” a website to rank highly for search phrases is like spitting on a house fire and telling the insurance adjuster that you tried to save it. Asking the search engine optimization professional to SEO your website in this manner is like calling the fire brigade and directing them to spit on it for you.

SEO is just one tactic in a larger marketing strategy. Until you grasp that concept, you are just spitting.

Please realize for just a moment that money alone will not create success in small business marketing efforts. OK, maybe with huge amounts of money, but not the “get it fast and cheap” amounts of money that most small businesses bring to the table. Success takes participation, and often a lot of it. It means having a direction in your business, being ready to follow that direction, and changing direction as needed.

Why Small Companies Are Small

Small companies are small for a reason. That reason varies a lot between companies, but it is often because of lack of participation and attention to the things which grow a business.

Many small businesses do not have the resources in place to oversee important areas of their business growth. When they lack the needed personnel to manage things like legal, accounting, marketing, research and development, and etcetera, they must improvise. That can create a huge burden, but if it was easy, it probably wouldn’t pay very well.

Putting somebody in charge and delegating your weak points is fine, in fact, it is a great idea. However, when it comes to your marketing, the part of your business where it reaches the customers, you should pay close attention to getting it right. Marketing is what will direct many of the other growth factors in a business. Lacking participation and just being a witness in your marketing can cause a chain reaction that destroys many other areas of a company. Marketing is an integral piece of a company that brings in money for all the other things a company needs.

Try asking a couple of marketing professionals how often they find themselves waiting on clients to complete simple tasks. It is often startling how much a marketing person has to hound clients just to send over the pictures they said they were going to send last week, or the reports they asked for two months ago. Willingness to pay attention and complete simple marketing related tasks is often reflected in the overall success of an organization, and it is what I call being a “participant” rather than a “witness”.

I am not trying to sell you this idea, because you can probably already see it in companies all around you … maybe even your own.

Photo credit to Son of Groucho via Flickr

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SEO Lesson: Were You Just Browsing and Found This by Accident?

I have a request that you do not be a stooge, and that you do not treat SEO and Internet marketing professionals as stooges either.

During a phone call a moment ago, I was inspired to point something out about SEO (search engine optimization) and Internet marketing that is obvious to me, but clearly some people do not already understand. This is an extremely basic SEO lesson.

I make a point of asking people who contact me for Internet marketing a very simple question as follows: “How did you find me?” Of course I already know the answer, but so many people do not realize that we can track everything online.

My question has been answered in many ways, and even as silly as “I was just surfing the Internet and came across your website.” Even that answer is just fine. It is usually not a truthful one, and I actually already know when people contact me the exact way that they reached me. You see, when you email me or surf my websites, I can see your IP address, network name, location, what you searched for, and many other details that tell me who you are and how you found me. I ask people this question because of one important follow-up question that either goes right over their head or totally blows their socks off. That question is as follows: “Do you think it was an accident that you found me amongst the millions of other web pages out there competing for your business?”

This is Friday evening and I have a webcast to prepare for, so I do not want to take a lot of time with silly scenarios and rhetorical questions, but I have one more question to ponder. Now pay close attention and answer this honestly …

Do you think that you found this article on this blog about Internet marketing and search engine optimization by accident?

The truthful answer is that it was no accident at all, and I have created the means for you to find my blog. When people contact me about my services, I often have to remind them that if they found me amongst the millions of others out there, it is because I made it happen. If I did not create this article, and if I did not have the means to help people to find me, they would not find me.

When you approach any SEO and Internet marketing professional because you found them, you must question just how and why you found them instead of a website selling pink pantyhose. If you are confused why you found me instead of pink pantyhose, you should probably turn your computer off and get some rest.

Otherwise, perhaps you will be open to this crazy notion. If somebody can be sure that you find them instead of millions of others in the extremely competitive field of Internet marketing and SEO services, they can probably do the same for you.

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SEO Tip: Great Search Engine Optimization Means Paying Attention

My SEO tip today is about paying attention and taking action. There are about a squillion things that influence good SEO, and even more things are required to achieve great SEO. Paying attention to details can sometimes make the difference between good SEO and great SEO. Do I have your attention yet?

You are not, I repeat NOT going to get the best results that you seek from this article if you do not pay attention to detail. Good SEO has a lot to do with very fine details, and it often means paying attention to the details that the rest of your industry neglects. Today I am going to give you some thought-candy about the links which point to your website, but first, I am going to be sure that I have your full attention and that you are ready for this brain-exploding tip.

I think a lot of people try to make SEO seem a lot harder than it actually is. Really good SEO is actually quite tricky and time consuming, but there are many things that are pretty simple and tedious, but just need to be implemented properly. Knowing all of those simple and tedious tasks, and how they fit into the big picture of your search engine optimization strategy, and using them properly to receive optimal benefit is why people hire a search engine optimizer.

Squillions of people write tens of thousands of tips each day about search engine optimization. The good search engine optimizers choose their topic carefully, title it just right, tag the information well, add it to their search optimized website, and are sure to address it to the proper audience using just the right keywords. Then they emphasize the call to action, and make it clear why you found the information.

Good SEO (search engine optimizers) write their tips similar to the way they will perform SEO for their clients. In fact, you can tell a lot about them by the tips they give you (it is one of my top reasons to blog). Further, they provide the tips in the same way they expect their readers to implement their suggestions for those who try to take the do-it-yourself (DIY) SEO method.

The Great SEO will take a little additional time to do all of the things the rest of the world can only call “magic”. I do not want to let you down today, but this SEO tip is not designed to make a do-it-yourselfer a great SEO. It is just another piece in the puzzle that will help you to understand good SEO. I will say, however, that it is a pretty damn good tip that can help you move just a little closer to great. I still have to keep you reading regularly, so I cannot just give you that “SEO magic” all at once. Your head would explode, and I cannot have that on my conscience. Yes, imagine that, a search engine optimizer with a conscience … I guess there is just magic in the air today! Besides, I still want to leave you some reason to call on me when you have pulled all your hair out and get sick of letting business pass you by.

Now, on with today’s SEO tip!

Who Links to Your Site and Why Should You Care?

Links are at the front line of search engine optimization. The more high-quality links that point to your website, the easier it will be to rank for the things your site is about. The text within those links makes a huge impact on your ranking for certain topics. This is why many links to my blog include the words SEO and social media marketing. Those things are a focus of my blog, so it only makes sense that the links reflect this.

When important websites with a lot of authority start linking to my blog, I want to know it. I also want to be sure that they continue to link to my blog. I can control this in a couple ways, and the best of which is to keep producing consistently useful content. You know, the stuff people want to link to. Thanking them is not such a bad idea, either.

Another way to be sure the link-love keeps coming is to watch what received good links and write more of that. For example, a useful tip about a given topic (in this case, SEO) will often find its way into a lot of good streams of content, including both automated and manual linking. The automatic ones are pretty easy to manage, but the links created by people are a bit more tricky. You have to really blow somebody’s hair back to make them take the action of creating a link to you in their blogroll, or to submit your content to Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter, and etcetera. If you want them to write about it and link to you in a blog post, you practically have to reinvent electricity or come up with something so amazing that they want to print it out and rub it all over themselves. Short of that you must at least write about things that people want to read, and present it in a fashion they will keep reading.

Finding Your Best Backlinks

You should know who is linking to your website. I don’t mean just the links that are being clicked on. I mean the links that make your site more visible and valuable to search engines. Here comes a big fat juicy SEO tip for you. It is called Open Site Explorer and the information it can tell you is more than you may see on the surface. Yes, this is where you have to pay attention to the details. For example, I just looked at an Open Site Explorer report for this blog and found the interesting facts as follows:

The Technorati tag “guerrilla-marketing” has produced a link pointing to my blog article titled “Marketing Without a Budget: Guerrilla Marketing Tips“, but the new content under this tag has moved my link off the page as newer articles arrived. So it seems to me that since that link is from a valuable source page, I should probably write something about guerrilla marketing and be sure to tag it with “guerrilla-marketing”. Oh yes, this article is kind of Guerrilla Marketing related … gosh, I am glad I was paying close attention. I am going to add that tag in this blog post.

I also noticed that there was a pretty nice link from the tag “whiteboards” that pointed to my article titled “Smart Slate, Smart Airliner, and Other Interactive Slates“. Perhaps I should write a follow-up to that piece and tag it appropriately.

My point is that if you pay close attention to the things which make your website rank well, there is a lot clearer path to success. Knowing that I am in the blogroll of great blogs like the ones listed below can give me a lot of reason to want to throw back some link-love to them and also keep reading their work.

These matter to me, and certainly deserve my attention (Thanks Guys). After all, they show faith in my work by linking to me. To some people, this is just a small detail, but to me it is a really important factor.

Paying attention to the sites linking to you, both automated and manually, can make a huge difference in your success. Now the question that remains is this: What will you do with this information? Were you paying attention and will you use what I have suggested? I want to guess the answer is “yes”, but there are a lot of people who do not pay attention. I hope those are your competitors and not you!

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Find Good SEO: Why Good SEO Don’t Seek Your Business

Being ranked at the top of search listings on Google, Bing, and etcetera, for the things that make companies money is a very competitive endeavor. The SEO who can produce really fantastic results are few and far between. The demand is high, and the supply is comparatively low. SEO is a tricky business, and to find good SEO is kind of like finding a needle in a haystack. What makes it even harder to find good SEO (search engine optimization), is that the best SEO (search engine optimizers) are not seeking you.

Unless you sell fish milkshakes or garlic scented breath spray, you have probably noticed that there are a lot of others trying to attract the same customers as you. I should not need to explain all the reasons for wanting to be at the top of search listings, but I will say that being there is very valuable. I don’t just mean being there for your few “important” search phrases like your company name. I mean being there for the right search phrases, with the right marketing message, and a website that will convert lookers into buyers. I mean being listed for thousands of searches and maximizing your lateral keyword effectiveness. This is a job of the SEO, and we are paid to do the work that makes most people want to pull their hair out and scream at their computer. We do what others cannot do. In fact, maybe we are just a little more like Superman than we like to let on. You know, we try to be pretty humble (even though it is difficult).

Good SEO Are Not Salespeople

It has often been said that a good SEO does not need to seek business. If they are skilled at search engine optimization, there are many great opportunities open to them. This does not mean they do not want your business, but only that they are probably not banging down your door, ringing your phone off the hook, or filling your email inbox with offers of cheap SEO services. Now, I should explain that I don’t mean the ho-hum average SEO, but the ones who really deserve to carry the title of Search Engine Optimizer. There are a lot of fakes, but I have already explained how to tell the difference between good SEO and bad SEO. If you missed that article, you should make time to read and find out.

Why do I think that good SEO are not salepeople? Well, I think most SEO can probably sell SEO if they have to, but for most of us I think it gets pretty aggravating to answer salesy questions that people do not actually even care to know anyway. I mean, do you really think a client needs to know each detail of the work to be performed? Do they need to know everything the SEO knows? If that was the case, they would do it themselves. They just need to know that the SEO is good at what they do, and that they will receive quantifiable benefit from the work. Hell, I hate selling SEO, but I love performing the work. Go ahead and search Google for sell SEO and see if you find me there (Hint: Don’t look down). To me, proof should be all the selling I need to do. If somebody wants more than that, I guess I can take my shirt off and show them my sexy chest, because that would likely mean more to them than my in-depth SEO lesson that will go right over their head anyway.

Good SEO Are Quirky, But Entrepreneurial

As people, the best SEO (search engine optimizers) tend to be a little bit quirky, opinionated, eccentric, clever, and above all, entrepreneurial. SEO do not choose this work just because all the other jobs down at the 7-Eleven were taken. We do it because we have a passion for success, a competitive spirit, and often something to prove … call it a Napoleon complex if you like. SEO is a field filled with some truly astonishing marketing talent that is honed every day by constant studying of people, trends, facts, figures, and of course, the “secret ingredient” that we will never share with you because after all, you are not “in the club”.

Why SEO Don’t Seek Your Business

So, you may still wonder why I say that “good SEO don’t seek your business”, and that is something I am here to answer. The reason is this: A good search engine optimizer can take their skills to any industry, at any time, and invest themselves in that industry and earn a fortune. This is not a myth, and a good SEO can back it up. I would say that it is even true that a “pretty good SEO” can achieve a high level of success if they put enough time, study, and patience into their work in a given industry. In my case, I earned millions of dollars selling wholesale Internet services over the past decade. That did not happen because I was passionate about selling dial-up Internet access and web hosting services to ISPs. It happened because I was passionate about SEO, and I kicked that market in the ass hard enough to amass up to 2,000 resellers. It would have been even easier if I could have just been the SEO all along and not had to work as the CEO, too.

You may wonder why, if a search engine optimizer is good, they would choose to work with clients’ projects instead of selling their own product or service. This is where some people just don’t understand the required focus of SEO work. If I wanted to sell cigars online, you can bet I would corner the cigar market. I am already well listed in Google for cigar related search terms, and I am not even a cigar retailer. I don’t want to sell cigars. I do not want the hassles of operating another business … I just want to sell other people’s cigars. That is why I am a search engine optimizer. As you may have noticed, my blog is “a Web Guy” and not “a Cigar Guy”. I want to focus on making products and services successful with better SEO, and not deal with all the operational headaches of the business.

Good SEO Seek Opportunity

The reasons freelance or agency SEO consulting is so attractive to a good search engine optimizer has a lot to do with our entrepreneurial drive, and our passion for success. In order to be a really great SEO, it takes a lot of focus and love for the work. I will speak for a group when I say that most of us love wielding our success tools and reaching the top of search results and making more business happen. We think like a Mount Everest climber. We have one overall goal in mind, and that is to reach the peak.

SEO will often turn away business for reasons that you may not understand. This is not entirely about money, either. We seek opportunity, and much of the time, the client simply does not have the opportunity we are seeking.

Another reason good SEO do not seek your business is because until you understand the value of our work enough to come to us, you would never pay us more than a small fraction of what our work is worth. Unless you understand that we pay you more in increased business and brand recognition than you will ever pay us, you are just not ready.

Consider how you would react to a qualified SEO with a track record of success and a proposal that he or she will work tirelessly over the next year to make your product or service offering more visible, with better brand recognition, higher conversion of lookers to buyers, higher profit margin, and they can back it up with real numbers. They even come to you with legitimate SEO guarantees that make sense to you. How do you answer to that? Do you say “No, I am totally happy where I am … I don’t really want more customers.” If that is the case, which sometimes really is the case, then why in the name of all things intelligent are you reading this blog? You want more business or you should be reading something a whole lot more suitable to sitting in a rocking chair or moving to Florida to play golf. No, instead, you want more business, and you want to know ways to make that happen.

Once you accept this, the only obstacle left is for you to get up off your wallet and push your marketing “Go” button. Just don’t ask a qualified SEO to start begging for your business or offering you discounts while you are getting more out of the transaction than they are.

Summary: The best SEO are the ones you find, and not the ones who found you.

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